People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

It doesn't matter if you're right or not, a number of people are going to flame you to hell for that. We are not allowed to consider military members to be anything but heroes.

FTA"We are devastated by the loss of our son, brother, uncle and boyfriend."

I knew the inbreeding was bad over there, but damn.

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

I won't flame you, but I disagree with you. The taliban aided and hid those most responsible for 9/11, and deserved retaliation.As to this soldier, he died trying to protect his fellow soldiers, and I respect his sacrifice.

cantsleep:DrPainMD: People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

I won't flame you, but I disagree with you. The taliban aided and hid those most responsible for 9/11, and deserved retaliation.As to this soldier, he died trying to protect his fellow soldiers, and I respect his sacrifice.

They aided and hid those people based on thousand years-old traditions of guest-rights and hospitality, which if we'd taken half a minute to understand, we could have circumvented through diplomacy, bribery and our own outreach. But we didn't, we just told the innkeeper he and his family were evil and we'd be killing them all now.

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

War of aggression?

Nice try. Afghanistan was always a defensive war, retalliation for the attack on the United States on 9/11/01. UK involvement is pursuant to the invocation of the North Atlantic Treaty (i.e. the Taliban regime governing Afghanistan sanctioned an attack on the US, was therefore legally an attack on every NATO power, including the UK).

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

ignore (troll) click!there's ways to express yourself that don't make individuals place you one the ignore list.In your next registration you might like to try learning them.Adios till then.

Suede head:When you're lying half-dead on Afghanistan's plainsand the women come out to cut up what remainsjust roll to your rifle and blow out your brainsand go to your God like a soldiersoldier of the Queen

Suede head:When you're lying half-dead on Afghanistan's plainsand the women come out to cut up what remainsjust roll to your rifle and blow out your brainsand go to your God like a soldiersoldier of the Queen

ghare:Suede head: When you're lying half-dead on Afghanistan's plainsand the women come out to cut up what remainsjust roll to your rifle and blow out your brainsand go to your God like a soldiersoldier of the Queen

Silverstaff:DrPainMD: People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

War of aggression?

Nice try. Afghanistan was always a defensive war, retalliation for the attack on the United States on 9/11/01. UK involvement is pursuant to the invocation of the North Atlantic Treaty (i.e. the Taliban regime governing Afghanistan sanctioned an attack on the US, was therefore legally an attack on every NATO power, including the UK).

They started this one, so it isn't a war of aggression.

That's just the causus belli we used to justify the invasion. The Taliban were just one political party in the region, the vast majority of Afghanistan was and is nominally ungoverned except by local law and custom, so how do we invade an entire country, displace millions, kill thousands of civilians? We do it because Rumsfield, Bush and Chaney want to clear the decks of any future threat, get a nice war going to boost the party status, and use 9/11 cynically as a pretext to invade not just Afghanistan, who really had nothing to do with 9/11, but Iraq, who were avowed enemies of Al-Queda. That's just historical fact now, with documentary evidence to support it, thanks to FOA findings by American journalists and wikileaks media blasts. It's not even technically a war, since we declared them all terrorists and not legitimate soldiers, sidestepping all sorts of treaties and internal checks on war-operations. Convenient, that.

It's all absurd, but I don't think it has any bearing on whether an individual soldier should receive a medal of valor, since that's just predicated on individual acts of bravery, not foreign policy considerations. Still, I wish first-responders, doctors and educators got equally grand medals for achievement and bravery, the hawkish bent of half the U.S. (And I assume the UK has it's own variant) is tiresome to put up with.

deadsanta:It's all absurd, but I don't think it has any bearing on whether an individual soldier should receive a medal of valor, since that's just predicated on individual acts of bravery, not foreign policy considerations.

That's a great way to put it. Individual valor is just that, a judgement of the individuals actions in that situation.

Modern politics that caused the situation to occur are irrelevant mostly. Sure, if you fought for the south and the right to keep slaves, there's an argument to be made there, but the modern soldier is pretty much kept out of the loop, so to speak. They sign up to serve and protect, and leave the thinking and decision making up to others.

Maybe that makes them brainless jarheads, a tool in both senses of the word, but without soldiers backing government the world would be a very different and tyranical place where the strong are all powerful.

Thankfully we are social creatures for the most part and do sense a need to more or less get along, and to stop confrontation when possible, or when needed to defend ourselves and weaker members of our species from aggressors.

Now, that returns us to the people we've elected making decisions on behalf of us all, and all the dirty and shady reasons that go with that. The soldier is not to blame, the leader is.

If people were more active in a political nature, some of that dirtiness would go away. The reason those shady people manage to gain power is because the people let them. In a sense, griping about a soldier in a war a person doesn't agree with, is projecting his own personal fault.

That is the root of the problem. Sure, the leaders are to blame, but what allowed them to become leaders? We did. The theory behind our western society is that our leaders are supposed to represent the populace, AND to be regulated by the populace.

The populace has lost sight of much of that. We're too busy with Fark, WoW, Angry birds to do anything about it. sure, we may make an angry comment in the two minutes of the day that we use to think about such things, but other than that, we really don't care.

When democracy(as such, the term is used loosely) fails, it is only the fault of the people. Sure, the political leader may be a bad guy, but we expressly allow it when we ignore what he does.

When people project that fault such as the troll(poe's law of course) is doing in this thread, they do so on the wrong party(twice removed even) and only worsen the situation. It's akin to spreading misinformation, intent or no, that's the result.

It's the result of religious like thinking. Faith that our leadership is omniscient, so they stay out of it. These trolls/zealots take that to an extreme. Misplaced faith in a patron like system that does not exist. Our government does not exist to protect us, it exists to serve us. if we are not vocal in our needs and desires, the system fails. We, as a populace, are to blame.

tonguedepressor:ghare: Suede head: When you're lying half-dead on Afghanistan's plainsand the women come out to cut up what remainsjust roll to your rifle and blow out your brainsand go to your God like a soldiersoldier of the Queen

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

ghare:tonguedepressor: ghare: Suede head: When you're lying half-dead on Afghanistan's plainsand the women come out to cut up what remainsjust roll to your rifle and blow out your brainsand go to your God like a soldiersoldier of the Queen

DrPainMD:People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

Your shoulders and back would probably hurt a lot less if you pulled your head out of your arse.

deadsanta:They aided and hid those people based on thousand years-old traditions of guest-rights and hospitality, which if we'd taken half a minute to understand, we could have circumvented through diplomacy, bribery and our own outreach. But we didn't, we just told the innkeeper he and his family were evil and we'd be killing them all now.

The same goes for you. Your attempt to follow up and sound intellectual in another post is noted and by the way all those lovely websites that told you what you wanted to hear might just have had an agenda behind it so the idea that you're holding them up as some unassailable fortress of unbiased truth is really quite amusing. I'm guessing that all the contradictory information out there that flies in the fact of some the things you believe must all be wrong or some kind of grand conspiracy.

The primary base of operate for Al Queda was Afghanistan. Irregardless of where the funding and support came from that is where the leadership and main infrastructure of the organization was. The idea that we might have been able to negotiate something with the Taliban is utterly laughable. This was a government of brutal subjugation who allowed Al Queda to exist within their country and nobody in their right mind questions whether the Taliban actively supported/worked with Al Queda. There's a reason they became almost indistinguishable from one another once the fighting began.

The are the worst kind of ignorant fool. The type so filled with sanctimony and self righteous indignation that you've actually gone out of your way to make yourself more ignorant. You are literally making a concerted effort to be stupid for your own sake.

deadsanta:cantsleep: DrPainMD: People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

I won't flame you, but I disagree with you. The taliban aided and hid those most responsible for 9/11, and deserved retaliation.As to this soldier, he died trying to protect his fellow soldiers, and I respect his sacrifice.

They aided and hid those people based on thousand years-old traditions of guest-rights and hospitality, which if we'd taken half a minute to understand, we could have circumvented through diplomacy, bribery and our own outreach. But we didn't, we just told the innkeeper he and his family were evil and we'd be killing them all now.

randomjsa:DrPainMD: People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

Your shoulders and back would probably hurt a lot less if you pulled your head out of your arse.

deadsanta: They aided and hid those people based on thousand years-old traditions of guest-rights and hospitality, which if we'd taken half a minute to understand, we could have circumvented through diplomacy, bribery and our own outreach. But we didn't, we just told the innkeeper he and his family were evil and we'd be killing them all now.

The same goes for you. Your attempt to follow up and sound intellectual in another post is noted and by the way all those lovely websites that told you what you wanted to hear might just have had an agenda behind it so the idea that you're holding them up as some unassailable fortress of unbiased truth is really quite amusing. I'm guessing that all the contradictory information out there that flies in the fact of some the things you believe must all be wrong or some kind of grand conspiracy.

The primary base of operate for Al Queda was Afghanistan. Irregardless of where the funding and support came from that is where the leadership and main infrastructure of the organization was. The idea that we might have been able to negotiate something with the Taliban is utterly laughable. This was a government of brutal subjugation who allowed Al Queda to exist within their country and nobody in their right mind questions whether the Taliban actively supported/worked with Al Queda. There's a reason they became almost indistinguishable from one another once the fighting began.

The are the worst kind of ignorant fool. The type so filled with sanctimony and self righteous indignation that you've actually gone out of your way to make yourself more ignorant. You are ...

Salute, I have not favorited someone and voted smart in a very long time

deadsanta:They aided and hid those people based on thousand years-old traditions of guest-rights and hospitality, which if we'd taken half a minute to understand, we could have circumvented through diplomacy, bribery and our own outreach. But we didn't, we just told the innkeeper he and his family were evil and we'd be killing them all now.

Nice try.

We requested Bin Laden be extradited years before 9/11, twice, in 1998 and in 2000, for his role in other attacks like the bombing of the USS Cole and a series of bombings of US embassies in Africa.

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan made it crystal clear they would refuse to extradite Osama Bin Laden to the US for his jihad, saying he had done nothing wrong as his attacks had not harmed Muslims. Since he was not killing Muslims, the Taliban didn't see anything he did as wrong, and they told us that.

9/11 was the first major attack he launched after the Taliban regime made it clear they would never hand him over to the US, and that they saw nothing wrong with his jihad. So, it's not like we had any real expectation that another extradition request would help.

In this case we had thousands dead, a crater where much of lower Manhattan was, and a major portion of the Pentagon in rubble. This wasn't a bomb hitting a warship at sea, it wasn't a car bomb targeting an embassy overseas, we ignored that. . .this was 4 hijackings, intending to destroy 4 major buildings, resulting in thousands of fatalities on US soil and major damage to New York City and Washington DC. . .by an organization being actively supported and sheltered by a soveriegn government that had openly stated it saw no problem with that campaign of warfare

deadsanta:cantsleep: DrPainMD: People who participate in wars of aggression are not heroes. If you travel half-way around the world to fight people who are standing in their own front yards trying to defend their homes and their families, you're just a Nazi in a different uniform. Rot in hell, Ashworth.

I won't flame you, but I disagree with you. The taliban aided and hid those most responsible for 9/11, and deserved retaliation.As to this soldier, he died trying to protect his fellow soldiers, and I respect his sacrifice.

They aided and hid those people based on thousand years-old traditions of guest-rights and hospitality, which if we'd taken half a minute to understand, we could have circumvented through diplomacy, bribery and our own outreach. But we didn't, we just told the innkeeper he and his family were evil and we'd be killing them all now.

No, we based our reply on the aeons old tradition of "kill ours and we'll kill yours, asshole."

As an Englishman I'd like to say just one (long-winded) thing, if I may?

Thanks for killing all those women & children bro and making my life, & the life of my fellow countrymen, far less safe & free than it was during the IRA bombing campaigns of the 80's & 90's (that I grew up with).

Silverstaff:deadsanta: They aided and hid those people based on thousand years-old traditions of guest-rights and hospitality, which if we'd taken half a minute to understand, we could have circumvented through diplomacy, bribery and our own outreach. But we didn't, we just told the innkeeper he and his family were evil and we'd be killing them all now.

Nice try.

We requested Bin Laden be extradited years before 9/11, twice, in 1998 and in 2000, for his role in other attacks like the bombing of the USS Cole and a series of bombings of US embassies in Africa.

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan made it crystal clear they would refuse to extradite Osama Bin Laden to the US for his jihad, saying he had done nothing wrong as his attacks had not harmed Muslims. Since he was not killing Muslims, the Taliban didn't see anything he did as wrong, and they told us that.

9/11 was the first major attack he launched after the Taliban regime made it clear they would never hand him over to the US, and that they saw nothing wrong with his jihad. So, it's not like we had any real expectation that another extradition request would help.

In this case we had thousands dead, a crater where much of lower Manhattan was, and a major portion of the Pentagon in rubble. This wasn't a bomb hitting a warship at sea, it wasn't a car bomb targeting an embassy overseas, we ignored that. . .this was 4 hijackings, intending to destroy 4 major buildings, resulting in thousands of fatalities on US soil and major damage to New York City and Washington DC. . .by an organization being actively supported and sheltered by a soveriegn government that had openly stated it saw no problem with that campaign of warfare